This guest blog is by Alice Oates, a 2023 Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) Fellow. Her project, “Setting an agenda for disability-focused research in Antarctic Humanities and Social Sciences”, seeks to kick-start research into disability within the Antarctic research sector by identifying priority research questions. Alice is hosted by Dr Pedro Marques-Quinteiro at the Universidade Lusofona, Lisbon, Portugal.
If you aren’t familiar with Antarctica, you might imagine it as an empty continent, populated by penguins but certainly not people. You might then wonder, what does Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) have to do with (or in) Antarctica? People are part of Antarctica through research, logistics, arts, heritage, and tourism, and so are all the same exclusions and challenges faced by minority groups anywhere else in the world. Famous for the exploits of white, able-bodied men, Antarctica has a diversity problem – in the past, and in the present.
Antarctic EDI
Within the Antarctic community, institutions, researchers, and community advocacy groups are slowly creating more and more initiatives designed to make polar research more inclusive. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) recently established an EDI Action Group. The ‘Diversity in UK Polar Science’ initiative, created by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) Polar Regions Department, was established in 2019. Community networks aimed at different minority groups are proliferating on social media, such as Women in Polar Science, Impact Polar (racial and ethnic minorities), Polar Pride, and Access Polar (disabled researchers). Work by researchers has begun to reveal the sexual harassment and violence faced by women in the field, prompting long-overdue action from some National Antarctic Programmes.
But there’s something missing from this picture. Disability, a challenging subject for the Antarctic community, is underrepresented even within the already-small Antarctic EDI world. While EDI initiatives usually include disability in the list of areas requiring attention, that’s often as far as it goes, and there is no systematic research into historical and present experiences of disability within Antarctic research. Community efforts like Access Polar, run by volunteers with plenty of other demands on their time, need to be backed up by institutional support and research by people who are being paid to focus on EDI issues. We also know, through the example of Professor Meredith Nash’s report on sexual harassment in the Australian Antarctic Programme, that humanities and social sciences research has a vital role to play in bringing to light systemic barriers to inclusion that have otherwise been swept under the metaphorical rug.
Disability and Antarctic Research
Here’s where I come in. I’m a historical geographer specialising in Antarctic science and history. I have disabilities – I’m neurodivergent – and I’ve never been to Antarctica, although my doctoral research focused on one of its research stations (the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley station). Part of my doctoral research looked at recruitment practices and the characteristics required to succeed in the isolation and extremity of an Antarctic winter. Combined with my own experience of disability, this led me to start thinking about physical, institutional, and cultural barriers to disability inclusion in Antarctic research.
In 2023 I was awarded a Fellowship by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) for a proposed project on disability and Antarctic research. This is a short-term project, so I don’t aim to address or even identify every challenge facing disabled people within the Antarctic community. Instead, the goal of the project is to identify what questions should be prioritised by researchers in Antarctic humanities and social sciences. I want to know what questions to ask in order to promote and guide future research on these issues, with input from the Antarctic community. The Antarctic community is complex. On the one hand, there’s the question of access to Antarctica, normally mediated through National Antarctic Programmes or tourist operators. Disabled researchers wishing to visit the field, with all its unique physical and mental stressors, have to pass medical assessments, and may also face ableist perceptions of disability from within research institutions.
However, fieldwork is not a possibility or necessity for everyone in the Antarctic community. Despite this, visiting Antarctica can be associated with a sense of authority and legitimacy within the Antarctic community;(1) how might this affect a disabled person who either can’t, or doesn’t need to, visit the fragile, challenging, remote Antarctic continent? And how do perceptions of disability affect people’s experiences doing their jobs off the ice?
To try and untangle some of these questions I’ve launched a community survey requesting input from anyone with relevant experience to offer. It’s available in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian, and takes about 10 – 20 minutes to complete depending on how much detail you provide. The quotations included in this blog are taken from survey responses, and I am so grateful to all the people who have shared their expertise and experiences with me so far. If you’d like to support the project, please share the survey – everything helps!
https://scar.org/scar-news/disability-antarctic-research-survey
Want to know more?
1) HOWKINS, ADRIAN. “‘Have You Been There?’ Some Thoughts on (Not) Visiting Antarctica.” Environmental History 15, no. 3 (2010): 514–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25764466 .